How can communities recover from violence?

Late last year, G. Jeffrey MacDonald, who has been a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor for 15 years, was the guest on the JSH-Online.com Sentinel chat “How can communities recover from violence?” MacDonald wrote the cover story for the Monitor’s coverage of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He also covered the Boston Marathon bombing for USA Today. For the Newtown story, he received the 2014 Wilbur Award for Excellence in Reporting on Religious Issues. He is an ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ and brings his spirituality to bear in working on such articles. The following has been edited for publication. To hear the whole chat go to sentinel.christianscience.com/chat/communities.

As part of the introduction to the chat, MacDonald talked a bit about his work for the Monitor and the Newtown story specifically.

Right after the shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, the community was overwhelmed by the media. The Newtown United Methodist Church is located at the entrance to Sandy Hook, so the media were everywhere around the church. The pastor and others at the church felt they had to push back against the crush of press, so they called in a media consultant from the United Methodist Church. Their consultant knows me and offered me exclusive access to this faith community. I said I’d like to do the story for the Monitor, because the Monitor would handle it with the care and sensitivity that it deserved.

The Monitor gives me an opportunity to ask some deeper questions, and to do it in a way that leaves readers with a collection of facts and analyses that can edify, engender hope, instead of feeling overwhelmed or despairing. It helps people make sense of the world.

The photos needed to be handled sensitively as well. [Monitor photographer] Melanie Stetson-Freeman did a fantastic job on that front.

How were you affected by covering that story?

One of the biggest lessons I took from this is that everyone was changed by what happened. They got up the next morning, and they’re not the same person they used to be. This is partly why they arrived in great numbers in the church, not just to feel comfort or to be soothed. Certainly there was a need for comfort, but there’s also a reconstituting of identity, as people ask, “Who am I now after all that has happened?” There’s a lot happening in the self, and that gets worked through in dialogue with God, and with the faith community in a really profound way.

Does having a spiritual connection to God help alleviate the suffering and grief over the loss of family members’ lives in a violent act?

One of the people I interviewed was Robert Neimeyer at the University of Memphis. He has no connection to any spiritual denomination. He’s a psychotherapist and a researcher in psychology, and he has found something called post-traumatic growth. He says that after trauma, some people show exceptional growth in the areas of compassion, wisdom, altruism, and valuing of life. Those who make the greatest strides are those who have suffered the worst—in the case of people who have lost a child, or have lost a loved one to an act of violence. But not everyone does well—it’s not a one-to-one correlation.

I think you had some conversations about people who were greatly affected physically by these incidents and got some spiritual insights from them.

I did a piece about the Boston Marathon bombing for Religion News Service on the subject of amputees and spirituality, and the spiritual crises that come with losing a limb. I talked with some amputees in this process—both those affected by the marathon bombing, and others who have lived without a limb for a long time, and they spoke about it in terms of discovering a new identity, rethinking who you are. Sometimes a person is a runner, an athlete, or a dancer, and that’s no longer possible, or, at least, not in the same way as it was.

In that rethinking, a spiritual crisis may come that has a lot to do with identity and sense of purpose. There are some regional and national support groups composed of amputees reaching out to other amputees and saying, “I’ve been there, and we look together toward God to find our way in this, and to find the purpose that God has for us.” Many people I spoke to said: “I couldn’t have done this without people who understood my condition and my need to reach higher and to be connected with the Divine on this. The nature of my struggle was in many ways a spiritual one.”

The Monitor gives me an opportunity to ask some deeper questions, and to do it in a way that leaves readers with a collection of facts and analyses that can edify, engender hope, instead of feeling overwhelmed or despairing.

As a journalist, how do you see the role of the media in getting at the human heart of these stories, rather than focusing on the sensationalist aspects of an event?

There is a lot of pressure to sensationalize, to get hits on the Internet and such, and in TV, to literally trigger a sensation in your viewer. How can we do something better than that? Some of it has to do with respecting our subjects and our readers. We want to engage them for the better, and offer them something that is genuinely good and useful for them. An emotional roller coaster of leading them to be excited about this, and feel righteous indignation toward that, and just up and down all the time, is superficial, and it’s disrespectful of people. And so, I’d say we need to ask, “How can I tell this in a way that benefits the community?”

I think sometimes reporters try to be so far removed that they say: “Oh, I just tell the story. Outcomes are not my problem.” To an extent, that’s true, but you can go too far with that and pretend your reporting has no impact. It does shape how people see things, and if it’s going to have impact, it ought to have beneficial impact. It’s not a bad thing to keep that in mind.

Please summarize the major spiritual points you feel answer the question, “How can communities recover from violence?”

Here are some of the things I’ve learned in covering these stories. One is, they can create and honor the need for space so people can process what they’ve experienced. We need communities to offer that kind of place where you don’t just recover on your own in isolation. This should be a community that’s not oppressively forcing you into a certain type of response, but one that provides space for praise, venting, and comfort, initially. So the need for community space is one part of it.

A second is to recognize an important part of a community’s recovery from violence is claiming the rituals and the processes that our faith communities have established for us. That is, to sing the hymns, to say the psalms, to receive the sacraments, to confess at a time when you’re feeling shame, and to receive grace in that environment. Those communities are there to steer people into a place where they don’t become self-destructive or consumed by bitterness. Instead, over time, they practice learning to forgive, which is a complex, but important, part of healing, and to take steps to bless others in their outreach and acts of service.

Acts of service are tremendously healing and therapeutic for those who have felt the pain of tragic events. It may seem to be a little counterintuitive, but an act of service is a healing act. So, those are the important points. 

To say just a little more about the importance of forgiveness: something the pastor in Newtown said from the get-go, was, “We’ll need to forgive for what’s happened, but I’m not there yet.” People really appreciated that he was pointing in that direction, but admitting, “No way am I there yet.” To some extent, they felt like it gave them permission not to be there yet, either.

At the same time, they received a hand-delivered set of seven letters from an Amish community in Pennsylvania that had experienced the shooting of their kids. An Amish man collected seven letters from members of that Amish community, and he drove all night long to get to Newtown. He brought these letters to the church whose story I was covering for the Monitor.

The Amish response after their children were shot was to go to the home of the shooter’s family within hours after it happened and say, “We forgive you, and we forgive him for what he’s done.” This was the very night that he’d murdered their kids. They admitted over time, and were very clear, that this wasn’t something that they could just do at the snap of a finger. It was very hard. They said: “We’re going to do this, and our hearts will catch up with where we’ve put our feet. Our hearts are not there yet.” 

So that whole aspect of forgiveness, I guess, is a difficult one, but it’s a matter of learning. The tradition calls you in a certain direction, and then you catch up with it, and that’s part of the wisdom of doing all this in dialogue with a faith community.